128 pages : 27 cm

From Ada Louise Huxtable...here is an energetic defense of cities and a brilliant consideration of the skyscraper as art, as business, as the product of politics and speculation. Despite the fact that the skyscraper has existed for a century, the question of how to design the tall building has never been resolved. In a vivid account of the search for a skyscraper style, Huxtable takes us from its pragmatic beginnings in the 1890s, when technology limited style, to the first decades of this century, when architects looked to the past for inspiration and created outsized cathedrals and châteaux, to the revolutionary simplicity at midcentury of the International Style's glass boxes, and on to the spectacularly varied towers of the present day. Drawing on over a hundred photographs, she shows us definitively why certain skyscrapers function as great architecture and others do not. -- from book jacket

Includes index

From Ada Louise Huxtable...here is an energetic defense of cities and a brilliant consideration of the skyscraper as art, as business, as the product of politics and speculation. Despite the fact that the skyscraper has existed for a century, the question of how to design the tall building has never been resolved. In a vivid account of the search for a skyscraper style, Huxtable takes us from its pragmatic beginnings in the 1890s, when technology limited style, to the first decades of this century, when architects looked to the past for inspiration and created outsized cathedrals and chateaux, to the revolutionary simplicity at midcentury of the International Style's glass boxes, and on to the spectacularly varied towers of the present day. Drawing on over a hundred photographs, she shows us definitively why certain skyscrapers function as great architecture and others do not. -- from book jacket

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